The Paradox of India

The
paradox is that India survived the chokehold of imperial brutalization by 3
major empires across a span of 35 centuries, beginning with the Arian
invasion in 1500 B.C. that started the Vedic Dark Age, which was followed by
the Brahman Dark Age, the Mongol imperial rule, and in modern time by the
colonial rule of the British Empire that was built on the looting of India
by the British East India Company in the first place. India finally won its
freedom back in 1947 after 3,500 years of foreign enslavement.

India
now faces the struggle to free itself of a vast sea of dehumanizing
tragedies that became much of its history. The paradox is that India is
looked upon as a backward country, while in real terms it has achieved what
no other people in history have achieved. It stands as a country made up of
130 nations living together, cooperating, struggling, hoping, building, and
rebuilding their culture and their humanity, and celebrating them together.
What are the problems that remain compared to that? In this larger context
India stands as a light for the world, in which the world itself may yet
find its peace.

Indira's smile faded. "What you are saying hurts, Peter," she said moments later. "We are the most daring, and the most progressive country on earth. We are not backwards as the world may see us, and our history isn't that black."

"But wasn't all of India put into a terrible bind throughout its history that you are still struggling to get out of?" I spoke to her in a quiet tone. "Your history has been one of unspeakable tragedies that had lasted for millennia. Under the kind of yoke that India had to bear a people tend to become small and loose their humanity. But you struggled through all of that. It is evidently not easy for a people to dig themselves out of such a hole. Nevertheless you did this. You came out of a dark history in which the smallest light would have appeared precious. And so should love always appear to every human being, because it is precious. I think if the tragedy in your history has taught us anything at all, it should have taught us at the very least that love is an infinitely precious light, because that light had been drowned out in India's distant past for a millennium or two in the worst possible way by an invading force."

"What do you really know about the history of our country, Peter?" said
Indira. "I suspect you know very little about our real history, the history that has shaped us, that is still a part of us."

"Then let me surprise you, I know quite a lot," I interrupted her. "I heard a young woman speak in Russia about India's darkest past. That was quite a few years ago. She spoke during a youth conference. I was amazed by what she had laid before us. She took us back in time about 5,000 years to the Golden Age of the Harappan Civilization along the Indus River that ended abruptly one-and-a-half millennia before Christ. She said it was destroyed by the Arian invaders that flooded into India through Southern Afghanistan. She said that the Aryans had lived in the vast grasslands north of the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea as a nomadic horse culture. The resulting mobility had made them powerful. They began to expand southward into what is today's Iran and then westward into Southern Afghanistan, and from the North through the Hindu Kush over the Khyber Pass, and from there across the Indus River into India. She said that they wiped out the Harappan civilization on they way into India, that had lived for more than a thousand years along the Indus River. She said that the Vedas described 'proudly' how the Aryans destroyed the Harappan's irrigation systems that had enabled a rich agriculture in that region for many centuries. They also appeared to have destroyed their cities, their culture, and their people in vast massacres. She told us that this wanton destruction was also what they had in mind for the numerous other cultures that had established themselves all across India, the
Negroids, the Semites, and the Mongoloids. The people that had lived your land at this time were systematically exterminated or enslaved. She said that the Aryans believed themselves to be a superior race and had deemed the rest of humanity not really human. Their 'religion' of racial superiority had justified their relentless massacring of all other races and people, and the looting of them, or their ruling over them in forced slavery. She told us that it was this brutal Aryan religion that became codified in the 'infamous' Vedas, as she called them, together was a few remaining threads of the original Indus and Hindu spiritual perception."

Indira nodded and looked away.

"Their imperial ruling over a subject people that were spread across an entire subcontinent would have been quite a challenge for them, being a tiny minority, if they hadn't perverted the mysterious religion that had been developed in India into a tool they had gave them power over the people thinking to enforce their social control. The Aryans solved that problem by transforming India's budding spiritual religion into a political tool for mass destruction and extermination. The Rig Veda, one of most holy books of Hinduism, is said to have been written in Afghanistan by the Arian invaders, which was subsequently brought into India to control the people there and wipe them out to a large extend. They literally caused their subject people to kill themselves, as 'inspired' the Veda, which was enforced by the self-appointed Arian priests, the holy rulers that called themselves the Brahmans. Out of the holy Vedas then flowed the most horrendous female genocide ever unleashed on this planet. It started with the religious killing of baby girls, and was also extended to the obliteration of women as brides, or as wives, and even when they became widows. It is said that in one tribe female babies would be thrown into air and cut to pieces by the warriors with their swords as the babies fell to the ground. Or they fed them to the crocodiles. Those who survived the female infanticide and became brides could of course be killed just as easily if their dowry wasn't rich enough for the family of the groom. The women that made it past this hurtle and became wives, were still not save from this terror. They could be killed for almost any excuse and had no means to defend themselves against the flimsiest arbitrary charges. If they survived long enough to become widows, they were still not free. The widows were demanded by the Veda to burn themselves alive in death rituals that would re-join them in heaven with their dead husbands. Of course after they stepped onto the flames of their funeral pyre their property became the property of the Brahmin. And that was just one aspect of the genocidal cruelty imposed on the women of India by the Vedas. Apparently some of that still lingers on. The Woman from India who spoke us at the conference in Russia had her own sister burned to death in a dowry dispute. She told us that the resulting Vedic Dark Age had lasted for more than a thousand years and had become an age of darkness unparalleled in history. She said it became a darkness in which no civilization survived; no writing; no culture; or an trace of even a semi-civilization. The human being had no value in this Dark Age. It had been an age of unending series of slaughters and massacres of native populations that far exceeded in ferocity the Nazi holocaust. She suggested that the Vedic Aryans might have been Hitler's mentors who had visions of a new Aryan race. In India the Vedic Dark Age gave way to what is now called the Brahmanic Dark Age that lasted for another 1,500 years. The Brahmins were the rulers, generally of Aryan decent. The difference between the two dark ages appears to be mostly superficial as far as I could make out from history books. The difference might be that the institution of the caste system gave the Brahmanic Dark Age its special name, in which Brahman sits on the top of the class pyramid as the ruler of all. The rest of society is divided into an array of lower casts, with the Untouchables existing at the bottom, and their women having a lower status than even that. The cast system, or course, was created and maintained by an artificially arranged division of wealth, as well as by imposed ignorance and by brutality in punishment. That's India's tragic history, am I right?"

Indira laughed. "Yes that's what one can read in to history books. You are right on that. But that's only a snippet. Also you may be wrong about the Harappan civilization. It is now believed that the Harappan had already declined and had largely died out, or had moved away, by the time the Aryans came into this part of the world. It appears that the Indus River had lost much of its volume since the earth had been in a cooling trend for a few thousand years by then. During the interglacial optimum that had preceded this cooling trend, the earth had been much warmer than it is today. The air heavy with moisture. The Sahara had been a green paradise with rivers flowing, where today only sand remains. The Indus River had probably been running heavy with fertile sediments in the early days, providing an easy living for the
Harappan. The easy living left the people ample time for cultural and scientific development. The practice of Yoga came from the
Harappan, and also of the earliest scientific discoveries, like the 'value' of zero, and probably also the decimal numbering system, came from that early time and from that part of the world. The Harappan had not only developed irrigated agriculture, they had also developed the first written language, going back some 4,000 years. They had built towns and cities. And the most amazing thing is that we find no military installations in their cities, and no palaces. They might have been the first, and possibly only, major non-imperial society on this planet. All of that is a part of India's history too, Peter. The Indus Valley was a part of India since the dawn of civilization until 1947. It was the cradle of India. It might have been the cradle of civilization as a whole. The whole of mankind might have been rooted in India, or Indi as it was called for most of its modern history. The word, Indus, is related to the Old Persian word Hindu, and in Sanskrit it's related to the word Sindhu that was the historic local term for the Indus River. It is also believed that like the name, India, the earliest Indian language, the Vedic Sanskrit came from the Indus valley. This seems to suggest that the Aryan learned their language skills from the Harappan language that might have given rise to the language for the Vedas. This kind of intellectual development that we have seen doesn't happen in the shadow of massive genocide. Perhaps the genocide came later. The Earth's climate had been in a gradual transition at this time. As the earth cooled down, the Indus probably carried less water, less fertile sediments, and living became harder. While the Vedas proudly proclaim that the Aryans destroyed the dam and irrigation system of the
Harappan, it is more recently believed that the Aryan invasion began when the earth was much drier, when living was harder, so that most of the Harappan had already left and the dam system was no longer maintained and fell apart on its own. Evidence also exists of some dire consequences followed the collapse of the dam system as the seasonal flooding of the Indus washed away most of the topsoil that the Harappan had cultivated. The bottom line is that we don't really know if the Aryans had caused the collapse of the Harappan civilization or whether the collapse had already begun much sooner. The same might have been the case for other cultures in India as well. The harsher the global climate gets, the larger becomes the upset of its effect in populations. That's part of our global history and appears to have been the cause of great mass-movements of populations, the kind of movements by which imperial power begins to take root. The development of imperial power that culminated into of the Vedic Dark Age and later into the Dark Age of Brahmanism wasn't broken until the end of the next major warming of the earth, which peaked at the medieval optimum when the Hindu Renaissance flourished. The famous erotic temples of Khajuraho where built at this time. It appears that Brahmanism vanished from the landscape of India in the light of the Hindu Renaissance that was immediately overshadowed again by the expansion of Islam that reached as far abroad as India. The Islamic Renaissance that India got drawn into gave India a new lease on life as it were. It ended the caste system. It gave us a much more human face, and some say, also a beautiful face. The Taj Mahal was supposedly built in that new era. Except it reflects the far more beautiful India of the Hindu Renaissance of a thousands of years ago. So it seem to me that the Aryan invasion that had caused those two long dark ages had not entirely wasted the human potential of India in those almost three millennia of cultural darkness. It also tells me that it was the revival of Hinduism coupled with the warming of the earth, which ended the dark ages in India instead of the Islamic invasion that came with its own blanket of darkness. Our history also tells me that India has a great deal to offer to mankind with a culture that survived longer than any culture of earth and against the greatest obstacles that were ever imposed in human history."